Ann Treneman’s review in The Times of The Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre concludes: “It ends badly in 2008, of course, but you knew that.” When I read the review, I took this to be a flippant comment. Having seen the play, I realise that her observation is more salient than I grasped. Stefano Massini’s saga runs for nearly three and a half hours in Sam Mendes’ production and only the opening and closing seconds deal directly with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. The playwright’s interest is in the preceding century and a half as he interweaves the related threads of the evolution over three generations of the Lehman family from immigrant arrivals to scions of the establishment, the transformation of the company they founded as a shop in Alabama into a dynamo of American capitalism, and the shifting sands of the Lehman family’s relationship to their Jewish heritage. It’s a tale of our times, told from the past.

The company’s founding is bound up with the slave-based cotton economy of the mid-19th Century. Hayum Lehmann arrives at New York from Germany and has already been transformed by the six-week journey: having learned to gamble and taken the measure of his fellow travellers from all over Europe. As if to underline the reinvention, he’s given a new name – Henry Lehman – by an immigration official and heads to Alabama where he opens a store selling fabric and clothes to the plantations. He is soon joined by his brothers, Emanuel and Mayer, and the business booms as they progress from selling cotton goods to brokering raw cotton to the industrialists of the north. If a business is informed through the years by its founding purpose, Lehman Brothers was not to be defined by its initial roots in retail. From the outset, it evolved as a shape-shifting vehicle for turning a profit: creating as much as responding to the twists and turns of American capitalism.

Not a great deal is made in the play of the context of slavery. This is jarring to modern sensibilities. But the story is narrated by the characters as they perceived it at the time. The slave economy was a given and, as the play presents them, the brothers slotted into it without much reflection. The journalist, David Goodhart – who is descended from Mayer Lehman – suggests this is a realistic portrayal (£):

The Lehman brothers … were welcomed in Alabama, where white Europeans were heavily outnumbered by African slaves. They repaid this welcome by becoming Confederate patriots during and after the Civil War. And as the shopkeepers prospered and grew into successful cotton brokers they also became household slave owners. Questioning slavery, as Roland Flade, historian of the Lehmans, points out, was not an option if they wanted to be accepted in Alabama. He also observes that they were evidently decent enough masters, as two of Mayer’s seven slaves moved north to New York with the family after liberation. Nevertheless the Lehman history is a useful reminder that people who are oppressed in one context can become oppressors in another.

In Alabama, the Lehmans are observant Jews. They sit shiva for a week when Henry dies in Alabama. By the time Emanuel dies, the firm is a major bank in New York and only three days of mourning are observed. When his son, Bobbie – the last Lehman on the board – passes in the 1960s, the bank stops for just three minutes. In this relaxing of orthodoxy, there is a symbol of the company’s loosening of its business values. The founders’ ethos of hard work and enterprise-building is consolidated by the second generation. The legacy must be protected – although, by now, there is a clear understanding that the business is less about trading commodities for money than about trading money as a commodity. While the religious orthodoxy may have eased, there remains a close attachment to the family’s Jewish culture. And this, it turns out, is pivotal to its commercial success. Lehmans was a risk-taking bank which provided seedcorn capital for the launch of great industries, such as the railways and Hollywood. As David Goodhart explains, this was the opportunity for the Jewish finance houses (Goldman being another):

Established banks such as JP Morgan tended to finance the big ‘robber baron’ companies in the late 19th century and it was left to the outsiders to back the riskier upstart companies. ‘Let the Jews have that one,’ is said to have been a common cry on Wall Street.

The bank survives the Wall Street crash by managing to avoid being one of the early sacrificial lambs allowed to fail prior to the federal government stepping in to refinance the industry. For the third generation, the legacy is enjoyed more than protected. Bobbie Lehman seems disconnected from his Jewish heritage and – although he is pivotal to guiding the bank through the post-crash years – he is portrayed as initially more interested in art and racehorses than in his stewardship of the firm. Under his watch, the family eventually loses control and Lehmans begins the shift toward speculative trading of financial instruments that sets it on the path to becoming the sacrificial lamb in 2008.

Through each evolution, there is the impression of the strategy and operations of the business outpacing the understanding of the older generation as they become figureheads in the boardroom. In its portrayal of a family business losing its way, the play reminded me of a visit to the museum of the Marks & Spencer archive in Leeds. There, too, the story is told (perhaps unintentionally, since the museum is operated by M&S) of the fading of a business, once driven by creative enterprise and social purpose to shape the sensibilities of a nation, but whose relevance diminished as the founding families withdrew and PLC status beckoned.

Throughout the play, both ends of the Lehman story are present. It plays out on the set of Lehman’s abandoned 21st Century office, as the cast deploy as props the cardboard boxes that redundant workers used to take home their possessions. But they are dressed throughout in the frock coats of the Victorian founders. It’s a moving production, and this derives in part from the fact that all the parts are played by just three actors: Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley. Their versatility evokes empathy for all the characters, none of whom is entirely good or bad. They capture the excitement and chutzpah of the building of a great enterprise which funded the creation of so many more. The whole thing ends with the ringing of a telephone signalling the bankruptcy of the bank. What a waste.

The march for a people’s vote on Brexit was a heartwarming occasion with 100,000 radical moderates quietly expressing their outrage with characteristic British understatement, self-deprecation and civility. Unlike the demonstrations of my younger years, there wasn’t a Trotskyist in sight to subvert the decency of protestors to their own ends. For a brief, glorious summer afternoon, it was possible to believe that Britain could find a way through the chaos it has brought upon itself and heal its wounds. People speculated whether the movement would be sufficient to bring about a change in course. I suspect not, at least not in the time left before Brexit is effected as a matter of law.

But in any case, there can be no going back to the world before 23 June 2016. Britain is already changed by the referendum, divided against itself and with the disinvestment plans of major employers at an advanced stage. More pertinently, there are other players in this drama. The EU shows every sign of wanting to cauterise its Brexit wound so that it can turn its attention to more pressing concerns. And the wider outlook for democracy and international solidarity has never looked so precarious in my lifetime. The Brexit referendum result, it turns out, was by no means an outlier but a precursor of a nationalistic and populist impulse which has swept through Western countries. Were we to decide against glorious isolation after all, and advocate once again for the rules-based order, it’s by no means clear that the world would want to listen.

David Charter provides an insightful analysis of the breakdown of the Franco-German vision (£) that has driven the EU since its founding. Just as Britain prepares to leave, the EU itself faces extraordinary convulsions which may bring about a looser association or – less likely – the union’s disintegration:

“It’s not Britain’s imminent departure that threatens the EU, but the rise of nationalist parties, driven largely by the bloc’s failing immigration and economic policies. And at the epicentre of the EU’s degeneration sits one person: Angela Merkel… Suddenly Germany has become the symbol of everything wrong with the EU and a struggle has begun for control of the direction of the bloc. Rising young power brokers like Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old right-wing chancellor of Austria, have very different ideas to the ‘founding fathers’ of European integration. His country is bruised from years of uncontrolled borders that have brought voters to boiling point over illegal immigration. Nor did the brash new leaders of Italy arrive in office by accident. Italian appeals for ‘solidarity’ from their EU friends to help cope with the increasing number of asylum seekers using Italy as a gateway to the Continent fell on deaf ears for years.”

As increasing numbers of EU nations support each other in their nationalist turn, there is a contradiction in their agenda – as every nation that turns away migrants is implicitly relying on the solidarity of their neighbours to shoulder the burden. Many tenets of the EU – including a liberal view of integrating migrants while maintaining a well-funded welfare state – would be strained by such developments. As Niall Ferguson argues, policy makers have barely begun to grip this challenge (£):

“European centrists are deeply confused about immigration. Many, especially on the centre-left, want to have both open borders and welfare states. But the evidence suggests that it is hard to be Denmark with a multicultural society. The lack of social solidarity makes high levels of taxation and redistribution unsustainable… For Europe, I fear, the future is one of fission – a process potentially so explosive that it may relegate Brexit to the footnotes of future history.”

With the rise of nationalism comes an ugly authoritarianism. Two writers over the weekend noted echoes in recent development of the 1930s. In truth, this has been going on a while, but Donald Trump’s removal of migrant children from their parents has focussed attention. Jonathan Freedland reluctantly reaches for comparison with the Nazi era:

“The parents ripped from those 2,300 children on the Mexican border were not led off to be murdered. But there are grounds to believe they may never again see their sons or daughters, some of whom were sent thousands of miles away. There is no system in place to reunite them. The children were not properly registered. How can a two-year-old who speaks no English explain who she is? Eighty years from now, perhaps, old men and women will sob as they recall the mother taken from them by uniformed agents of the US government, never to be seen again.”

“But the echoes don’t end there. The wire cages. The guards telling weeping children they are forbidden from hugging each other. And then this chilling detail, reported by Texas Monthly. It turns out that US border guards don’t always tell parents they’re taking their children away. “Instead, the officers say, ‘I’m going to take your child to get bathed.’ The child goes off, and in a half-hour, 20 minutes, the parent inquires, ‘Where is my five-year-old?’ ‘Where’s my seven-year-old?’ ‘This is a long bath.’ And the officer says, ‘You won’t be seeing your child again.’” It’s not the same as telling Jews about to die they are merely taking a shower, but in the use of deception the echo is loud.”

Edward Luce sees Trump’s treatment of migrants, together with his denigrating of Western allies and stoking of a trade war with them, as clear signs of America stepping away from its leadership of liberal democracy. Here are three telling quotes he provides from US policy analysts. First, Constanze Stelzenmüller, a German scholar at the Brookings Institution:

“Make no mistake, there is a concerted attack on the constitutional liberal order and it is being spearheaded by the president of the United States.”

Next, Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA:

“We have never seen a US president egg on the undemocratic forces among our closest allies. Trump sees that Merkel is down. And he is trying to finish her off.”

And, finally, Robert Kagan, a conservative commentator:

“People forget that the post-second world war order has been an aberration. It relied on America to keep it together. Under Trump, we are returning to a world of multipolar competition. That is a very different and more dangerous world to the one we grew up in.”

Both Jonathan Freedland and Edward Luce highlight Trump’s use of inflammatory language – for example, talking of immigrants “infesting” America. Anne Applebaum notes that this kind of discourse is of a piece with the new breed of populist leaders in Europe and is straight out of the playbook of the dictatorships of the last century. She argues that, while they may not have the same aims in mind as their mass-murdering forebears, they are shifting the parameters of not just politics but human decency:

“These tactics will produce casualties. The border police who took children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border were mentally prepared to do so thanks to the language of dehumanization. About a third of Americans – most of whom would intervene if they saw a toddler being ripped away from her mother at the house next door – were prepared to accept it as well. They will also produce imitators and amplifiers, such as the Oregon woman who called for immigrants to be shot at the border, or the Fox News pundit who said there was no need to worry about those children because, after all, they aren’t American.

“In the longer term, there will be another kind of price to pay: Eventually it will be impossible to discuss real immigration issues, or to talk about real immigrants, if a large part of the public has come to believe in quasi-authoritarian fictions. You can’t speak about work visas or asylum laws if you think you are being confronted by a horde of rapists. You can’t find a European solution to a real refugee crisis, involving real people displaced by war, if the public only understands them as the inhabitants of nonexistent ‘no-go zones’. Veil reality in myth , and it becomes easier to manipulate – but impossible to understand or address.”

“These great patriots have been more than happy to ramp up the internal divisions they have created. More sinister than their adolescent sneering at ‘remoaners’ is their McCarthyite rhetoric of ‘saboteurs’ and ‘traitors’ subverting ‘the will of the people’, matched at street level by the upsurge of violence against EU – and indeed non-EU – immigrants, and rape and death threats against their opponents. Their ambition to pauperize and isolate our country is not sufficient: they also want to grind us into cultural dust.”

Rhetorical violence soon paves the way for actual violence, as does the denial of the complexity behind the challenges we face as a society. Democracy is founded on the respectful deliberation of difference. The abhorrent can become normalised when difficult challenges are made to seem more easily resolvable than they in fact are. The Brexiteers refuse to engage with the real trade-offs thrown up by the course we have chosen. Instead, as Chris Grey observes, they insist on the authority of the referendum as the only justification for the harm they are wreaking:

“The more damaging and impossible the plan, the more viciously they wave the tattered banner of ‘the will of the people’, virtually the only argument they now make for a policy that the majority of people no longer support. Meanwhile, many who know full well that what is unfolding is a disaster effectively shrug their shoulders and say that nothing can be done and that, no matter how foolish it is, it must be done.“

Authoritarians are impervious to appeals to decency. Over and above effective policy making and implementation, they have an interest in what Nick Cohen has called vice signalling. Trump climbed down over splitting up migrant families. But by then the policy had already done its work of communicating to his base just how serious he is about addressing their concerns by whatever means it takes. Brexiteers demonise their opponents with rhetoric that should be beyond the pale in a democracy. They aim to intimidate them into silence so that Britain gets over the legal line of Brexit, no matter how ill-conceived the route.

The debate about Brexit sometimes appears to occur in a Petri dish in which developments since the referendum are factored out of the equation. Brexiteers and anti-Brexiteers alike seem to underestimate the extent to which the world has changed around us. For Brexiteers, the fantasy of Britain as a buccaneering trading nation dissolves in the face of the rapidly evolving re-emergence of protectionism and trade war. For anti-Brexiteers, the ideal of a values-driven EU collaboratively addressing its problems seems to be slipping away as nationalists in government around Europe thumb their noses at its rules.

Saturday’s march clearly had an agenda to prevent Brexit. But who knows if that’s a likely prospect. For me, more is at stake than this. As the march went through Trafalgar Square, the demonstrators applauded the Muslims who had gathered there to celebrate Eid as a counter-demonstration on the other side of Westminster proclaimed its hostility to both gatherings. Beyond demonstrating its displeasure with Brexit, Saturday’s march was an assertion of a liberal, tolerant Britain that has not yet been ground into dust. Embracing members of all parties, comfortable with cosmopolitanism and multiple affiliations, insistent on civility and good humour – it represented the stuff that makes democracy possible and is under threat wherever we look. At some point, Britain will have to address the alienation and disaffection that fuelled the Brexit impulse. But, for now, the insurgency of decency will do.

Humans are a clever species. Look at the world we’ve constructed. The very name homo sapiens describes us as wise. But somehow we’ve come to live in a way that is inimical to our nature and destructive of our wellbeing. The organisations in which we work are part of the problem. They are incapable of maintaining bonds of trust with their employees, and obstruct our efforts to sustain our closest relationships.

This is the thesis of A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon which attempts to explain the science behind our fundamental need for human connection. Written by three professors of psychiatry, it was published in 2000. In my layman’s reading, its scientific authority has been overtaken by more recent neuroscience. But its date of publication is significant. At the start of a new century, the book aimed to debunk the mythology – whether psychodynamic or behaviourist – which shaped our understanding of emotions through the 20th Century. Insofar as these mythologies remain influential today, A General Theory of Love remains a relevant read. Indeed it seems prescient in its cultural criticism of how Western societies have developed so as to deny our physiological need for attachment, and the social maladies that thereby arise.

The authors draw on a conceptualisation of the human brain as a triune structure comprising the reptilian brain, the limbic brain and the neocortex. This is regarded by contemporary neuroscientists as an obsolete or even inaccurate model but it still does service as a useful simplification of how different clusters of the brain drive us in different ways. The reptilian brain powers our raw instinct for survival. It is characterised by the fight or flight impulse and is a stranger to empathy. The limbic brain is associated with our emotional connections with others. It has a direct bearing on our wellbeing: our physiological health is shaped but the quality of our connections. The neocortex is the most recently evolved part. It is the locus of our cognitive thinking, logic and intellectual knowledge. The authors contend that the domain of the neocortex has come to dominate modern life at the expense of our limbic health.

Neocortical thinking moves fast and jumps to “solutions” quickly. Culturally, we have come to put a premium on its emphasis on knowing. We are easily persuaded by an elegant strategy. But in reality, the authors argue, our drivers are “gloriously illogical” and this human reliance on the intellect blinds us to the exigencies of the limbic system:

“Our culture teems with experts who propose to tell us how to think our way to a better future, as if that could be done. They capitalize on the ease of credibly presuming, without a pause or backward glance, that intellect is running the show. Not so.”

The reason we can’t think our way to a better future is because the limbic brain establishes enduring modes of being which are impervious to mere thought. Where the neocortex relies on explicit conscious memory, the limbic brain leans more towards implicit memory which is largely instinctual. Through the accumulation of limbic attractors – clusters of neural connections that form in response to patterns of experience in relationships – each of us builds an internal reality which determines what love and attachment look like for us. A child who experiences stable and nurturing parenting will have a different understanding of what love is than one who experiences abuse. As these concepts are formed, they determine how we see the world, act in it and relate to others. Our minds map the world onto our limbic internal realities through “the accretion of infinitesimal influence”.

An environment which fosters healthy attachments and social connection is good for us not only as individuals but as a society. People who grow up with dysfunctional limbic attractors perpetuate dysfunction in the world. In the authors’ view of things, here lie the roots of our current epidemics of drug dependence, stabbings and moped muggings.

The risk is more widespread than you might imagine. Prevalent practices in Western society are not conducive to limbic health, for example: childcare (babies sleeping apart from parents; infants looked after by strangers so that we can work); schooling (children institutionalised from the age of four and made to fill their neocortexes with knowledge); and technology use (which promotes addiction and diverts us from human interaction in the real world).

Although our internal emotional models are not easily amenable to change through cognitive will, we are not condemned to live with our limbic inheritance. Our templates for attachment change through a threefold process of limbic resonance (our ability to detect the inner state of others), limbic regulation (how our emotions are shaped by those of people with whom we interact) and limbic revision (by which the internal models of attachment are modified).

It is through this threefold process that helping relationships such as psychotherapy and coaching achieve their results. We grow not in response to a clever insight that appeals to our analytic mind but through being held in relationship by another:

“Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force of another person’s Attractors reaching through the doorway of a limbic connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic brain of another.”

Practitioners in the helping professions may see themselves as guided by different and diverse cognitive theories or schools. But we are physiological beings and it is the activation through relationship of physiological mechanisms in our limbic system that determines the success of a helping intervention. The model of connection that the practitioner presents to the client is more material to bringing about change in a client than any knowledge content in the relationship.

One of the implications of this is that a client should be very careful who they choose as their coach. A successful coaching intervention entails the client, to some degree, becoming more like their coach. Any results are particular to their unique relationship. Clients would be wise to ascertain whether the coach is attending to his or her own emotional maturity through supervision or psychotherapy.

All of this challenges constructs around helping interventions as a short-term fix. This is especially prevalent with respect to coaching, where contracts are usually limited to a handful of sessions. It’s an illusion to think a lasting impact can be achieved in such a framework. As the authors say, short, sputtering treatments “flout limbic laws and thwart potential”. Senior leaders especially, facing complex and intractable challenges, would benefit from long-term intervention in which the practitioner gets alongside the client potentially for a number of years.

Lewis, Amini and Lannon point to a compelling reason why it’s an urgent necessity for leaders to open to this kind of development: the world of work has become dangerously out of kilter with our human nature. Capitalism has created an environment of disrupted attachments. People routinely move around their countries or between countries for work, becoming detached from their extended families and friendship networks. Isolated and lonely, they form false attachments with the organisations for which they work and often end up betrayed:

“Attachment urges prompt exploitation because companies do not have emotional impulses, and human beings do. A company has no limbic structure predisposing it to recognise its own as intrinsically valuable. People who extend fidelity and fealty to a corporate entity – legally a person and biologically a phantom – have been duped into a perilously unilateral contract. Steeped as they are in limbic physiology, healthy people have trouble forcing their minds into the unfamiliar outline of this reptilian truth: no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists outside the limbic domain.”

Since the authors published the book, our attachments to corporations have probably become deeper – extending to companies not just as a source of actualisation in our working lives but to brands as a source of actualisation in our consuming lives. These attachments may be pleasing in some respects. But they cannot fulfil the needs that we meet through relationships of love and connection with other human beings, even though increasingly they substitute for them.

Simply knowing this will not help address the malaise. We are in a spiral of false attachments. The more we turn to brands and products, particularly technology products with their addictive qualities, the more we cut off from resonant relationships with real people. This, in turn, leads us to invest further in work as a substitute for the emotional capital that is lacking in our lives, which become emptier still as we succumb to the demands of long-hours and always-on productivity. The allure of populism is explicable in this context too: the sick comfort of tribalism and identity politics comforts us as we realise that we’ve been taken for a ride by the deceptive promises of the work bargain.

Individually, we can try to opt out by attempting to rewire our brains to want differently. If we fill our lives with experiences of true attachments, we can find fulfilment that is not commoditised. But as a society, we need to find a way to rewire our organisations and our politics to put human needs at their centre. This calls for a new kind of leadership that isn’t remotely yet in view. By engaging together in limbic connection, leaders and coaches can help bring it into shape.

A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon. Available from Amazon.

]]>https://vogelwakefield.com/2018/06/engage-a-coach-to-save-humanity-from-itself/feed/45568When it’s time to finish coachinghttps://vogelwakefield.com/2018/03/when-its-time-to-finish-coaching/
https://vogelwakefield.com/2018/03/when-its-time-to-finish-coaching/#respondSat, 24 Mar 2018 07:00:00 +0000https://vogelwakefield.com/?p=4722Continue reading When it’s time to finish coaching]]>How to work with a coach, part 10

When is it time to finish coaching? And how do you end the relationship elegantly when you feel it’s time to part company with your coach?

Often, decisions about ending are determined in advance. There’s frequently an understanding that the coaching is a finite arrangement. This is partly philosophical: an assumption (not necessarily valid) that a client risks becoming dependent on their coach. Partly, it’s budgetary: the number of sessions is determined by the funds available. Whatever the reason, your coach will likely have a well-rehearsed model for bringing the coaching to closure.

Sometimes, the end comes about in more unexpected fashion. The contract might not have been specific about the number of sessions. Or, it might have been, but you want to exit early.

If you’re thinking of terminating the coaching, it’s best to make sure your coach understands this in advance so that he or she can orchestrate an appropriate ending. You don’t want to miss this: its purpose is to optimise the value you obtain from the whole engagement. Beyond that, there’s an inescapable aura of failure if the coaching just peters out. The work of coaching may well concern communicating honestly and with respect. If coach and client can’t bring their work to a satisfactory close, that points to work still undone in the relationship.

Whatever model your coach has for endings, you could benefit from considering independently what you need as the process closes. Given the investment of time and money you have made, you shouldn’t put the coaching behind you without taking the time to understand what you have gained from it. This is pivotal to integrating the learning that you have been generating over the preceding period. If you adopt the learning into your worldview, it is more likely to remain accessible to you – to show up in how you think and act – after the rhythm of regularly meeting your coach falls away.

This isn’t just a matter of recalling the content of the coaching. It’s also about testing, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the learning you took from each session still holds up? What strategies did you try? What were the impacts? How did people around you respond? Are you still maintaining the commitments you made? If so, is there encouraging learning that you want to integrate? If you’re not maintaining the commitments, did they serve their purpose and are therefore no longer relevant, were the habits too demanding or were the outcomes disappointing?

Another aspect of reviewing the learning concerns not the content but the disciplines of reflective practice that coaching has facilitated. Some of the value you will have experienced in coaching will have come from the space apart it has provided from the busyness of your everyday routine. How can you preserve some of that once the coaching is no longer inserting it into your diary?

You shouldn’t regard the reflective space that coaching has offered as an isolated indulgence in an otherwise attenuated life. The orientation of openness, experimentation and development that you cultivate in coaching is a great foundation for thriving in the complex and unpredictable environments most of us inhabit. If you let the transition to this orientation subside when the coaching stops, you will lose much of the benefit of the work. It will have been like a holiday, the experience of which fades into memory, when it needs to be a catalyst to a different way of being.

When you review the coaching experience, try to recall each of your sessions and ask yourself simple questions. What did you learn? What did you think and feel at the time about the issue you were tackling and about anything you tried as a result of the session? What do you think and feel about these now? What might you do differently in future? What helped you generate an insight that seems helpful in retrospect?

Asking these questions as you close the coaching will help you create a model for self-coaching once you’re on your own. These are questions you can ask yourself of any experience from which you want to learn from here on.

Mark your farewell properly. Your coach might ask for feedback. This is gold dust for any practitioner so think about what you can offer: thoughts on what they could do better as well as appreciation. Coaches live by word of mouth, so they will be delighted if you can think of any potential clients to refer to them or if you can provide a thoughtful testimonial. Talk about how you might keep in touch: perhaps by email or the occasional catch-up over coffee.

Finally, give some thought to how finite an ending you want this to be. You are embarking on a new stage of your journey, not reaching your destination. In due course, it might make sense to return to coaching again. This is a particular consideration in executive coaching. For senior managers, leadership can be a lonely place. A coach might be their only source of disinterested and grounded counsel. Sometimes, after an initial coaching engagement, it could make sense to transition to a different kind of relationship where a continuing relationship is assumed. The intervals between sessions might become longer and the perspective more strategic.

This needn’t be construed as dependence. It would be fanciful for a top athlete to aspire to mastery without the ongoing support of a coach. Why shouldn’t be so in other fields of life?

Sometimes coaching disappoints. But it’s a sign of the determined positivity that grips much of the coaching business that this isn’t well acknowledged.

As Steven Berglas, a psychiatrist turned executive coach noted in 2002, purveyors of coaching have an interest in inviting prospective clients into a story of readily attainable transformation. Coaching contracts are mostly short-term. This is ripe ground for clients forming misguided expectations of a quick fix. Coaches might reinforce this with an emphasis on behavioural change, the linearity of which defies the complexity of human experience. Because coaches mostly hold to a professional ethos of facilitating a neutral process, they can implicitly absolve themselves of responsibility when the product doesn’t deliver.

How do you know when coaching isn’t working? You might find yourself going through the motions: turning up for the sessions but not really engaging with the endeavour. Or you might be engaging wholeheartedly with the sessions but feeling that the process as a whole is not producing the outcomes you had hoped for.

In a way, it’s a testament to the value of coaching that disappointment doesn’t arise routinely. Clients often come to coaching because they’re stuck with something in their life. Frequently, they will have tried other approaches before and found themselves in recurring patterns which keep them stuck. The whole scenario is tailor-made for the coaching too to become stuck.

In his book Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others, James Flaherty maintains that people experience this sense of being stuck in diverse ways but share a common root: feeling unheld in the world:

“By this I mean that they do not feel in their body – and consequently in their emotions and thinking – that they have a place in the world. In this state, they find themselves working frantically to resolve the anxiety and frustration that invariably accompany this experience. Their actions become unskillful, self-defeating, and sometimes destructive. Frequently, they judge themselves negatively, disparage others, and cynically turn away from whatever support is offered.”

A client in the grip of feeling unheld can draw a strange comfort from being failed by coaching. It reinforces their impression of the difficulty they are facing and so lessens their personal sense of failure that they haven’t sorted things out before now.

If you find yourself getting stuck in coaching, ideally your coach will be aware of this too and might call it out. But it can happen that coach and client get stuck together, focussing on the manifestations instead of the root. A client’s anxiety about being stuck can communicate itself to the coach and thereby creates a parallel anxiety in them. Feeling the pressure, the coach might try to drive too soon towards some kind of fix.

This is to move in precisely the wrong direction, since it is in residing curiously in the difficulty – with just the right level of anxiety – that the creativity to transcend it is found. Michael Cavanagh, in his essay in The Evidence Based Coaching Handbook – calls this place of exploration in coaching “the edge of chaos”. He identifies common internal conversations – that can arise in coach or client – that can prevent us reaching it. These include: intolerance of ambiguity; rushing to closure on the goal; being the expert; avoidance of difficult issues. Cavanagh says all of these block the free flow of information that enables coaching to work:

“They seek to resolve the tension of being on the edge of chaos by either prematurely imposing order on the conversation, constraining what can be talked about, or introducing a level of anxiety that closes down communication.”

If you become aware that you are stuck in coaching, it is important to let your coach know. You need to form a partnership to work through the blockage. Coaching is a collaborative enterprise. It cannot help you if you are disengaging, mentally if not physically (that is, turning up for the sessions but not really opening to the process).

You have the option to part company, but this might not be the ideal outcome. The thing that is making you stuck is likely the very issue the coaching needs to explore. It may turn out that, in the exploration, you reach a boundary of coaching and need to consider some other form of support, such as psychotherapy. But, short of reaching this insight, changing your coach or even abandoning coaching might be just another evasion in the recurring pattern that has made you stuck before.

Remember, coaching is not a process that happens to you. What you put in will shape what you can get out of it. Try to put aside blame or cynicism. Better to bring a spirit of enquiry as to what’s making you feel stuck. Move from the manifestations to the root. James Flaherty recommends two areas of work to address that feeling of not being held.

The first is self-care. It can help to explore the different domains of your life – sleep, food companionship, exercise, self-expression and so on – to assess how well your needs in each can be realistically met.

The second is expectations. We are bombarded by cultural influences that set impossibly high standards for us – to be a world class leader, to have the perfect body. We compare our lives to these, find them lacking, and bring these unrealistic cultural norms into coaching. But life doesn’t really conform to these cultural ideals. We need to think in terms of being the best we can be given our circumstances, not the best by some absolute standard.

Addressing these two areas can bring a more harmonious balance to how you approach things and thereby break the recurring patterns that make you feel stuck. Sometimes coaching is inhibited because clients feel it is self-indulgent to spend the time on these kinds of questions – particularly if the sessions are funded by their employer. But, counter-intuitively, approaching questions of self-care and expectations provides a more robust foundation for approaching the ostensible issues than addressing them head on. It’s the oblique path that is often the better way.

]]>https://vogelwakefield.com/2018/03/if-your-coaching-isnt-going-well/feed/04599I, Tonya shows the role of power in achievementshttps://vogelwakefield.com/2018/03/i-tonya-shows-the-role-of-power-in-achievement/
Sun, 11 Mar 2018 17:36:30 +0000https://vogelwakefield.com/?p=4538Continue reading I, Tonya shows the role of power in achievements]]>

Craig Gillespie’s film I, Tonya – starring Margot Robbie as the American figure skater, Tonya Harding – shows us how power, or the lack of it, can frustrate even the most promising blend of effort and talent.

Tonya Harding had both in spades. She was famously the first American woman to achieve the phenomenally difficult triple axel jump in competition (and only the second in the world). Her skating career came to an end after she was implicated in an attack on her fellow competitor Nancy Kerrigan. But, as portrayed in the film, this incident arose out of a wider nexus of class and gender relations that had held her back from the outset.

The film’s story is that of a girl who, against the odds, defies a life of poverty and abuse (first by her mother and then by her husband) to achieve the impossible on the national stage. Undereducated and lacking refinement, she annoyed the skating judges by sticking resolutely to her own terms. Sometimes, this was out of necessity: she performed in home-made clothes because she couldn’t afford the prissy fairy costumes traditionally worn by female skaters. Sometimes it was just that her taste was out of sync: she skated to the music of ZZ Top when the judges would have preferred Mozart. Despite her technical and physical talent, she would be marked down because of her presentation.

You can’t help thinking, as you watch, that it’s a testament to Harding’s grit and dedication that she got as far as she did. Not just that she faced class prejudice from the judges, but also that she managed to screen out the noise of constant beatings and disparagement that she experienced at home. In Harding’s mother, the film portrays a poor model of motivation: a woman who went so far as to pay a heckler to remind Harding, as she went onto the ice, that she was no good. Her husband, Jeff Gillooly was overshadowed by Harding’s success and there are graphic portrayals of him attacking her.

All of this is mediated through a collection of unreliable narrators: Tonya Harding herself, her mother, her coach, and her ex-husband – all of whom were interviewed for the movie. The events are disputed by the characters. But the film’s sympathies lean to Harding’s version and much of its power derives from the unflinching portrayal of abuse: the shadow side of the idealised and infantilised feminity, complete with forced grins, presented on the skating rinks. Harding herself has told the New York Times that she loves the film:

“People don’t understand that what you guys see in the movie is nothing. That was the smallest little bits and pieces. I mean, my face was bruised. My face was put through a mirror, not just broken onto it. Through it. I was shot. That was true.”

Then comes “the incident”, as she refers to it. And this brings an abrupt end to the American-dream narrative of the poor girl making good. It’s not exactly clear what part, if any, Harding played in the attack on Kerrigan. The film implies it was negligible (she was convicted of hindering the investigation). But she is treated as guilty by association with the characters around her – her husband and his friend, Harding’s presumed bodyguard – who should be bit-part fantasists in Harding’s drama but who end up overwhelming her story. They plan the attack, hiring an assailant, as Harding is shown focussing on her preparations for the Lillehammer Olympics. Effort and talent are not enough. Harding experiences the vengeful ostracism of the establishment – the skating hierarchy, the media and the criminal justice system – which seems happy to bring down the bad-ass girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Her career is over at 23. She finds she cannot escape her circumstances after all.

The multiple unreliable narratives create an impression of different realities colliding and this helps give the film its resonance. Harding is playing the mindset game, dedicated to perfecting her performance. Her coach exhorts her to indulge the prejudices of the judges. But if Harding’s background makes her blinkered to the impression she is making, her lack of financial resources make her powerless to rectify it. Meanwhile, her trajectory is being detonated by people with little capability or social capital, asserting themselves beyond her field of vision. Even though both Harding and Kerrigan make it to the Lillehammer Olympics, the Olympians seem irritated that their story has made a sideshow of the competition. Kerrigan has to settle for silver when there is a suspicion she should have taken gold. For Harding, the pressure of it all finally cracks her and she ends up in eighth place.

It all adds up to a highly textured portrayal of the systemic dynamics around an individual and how, try as you might, you cannot always be author of your own story.

Bonus material

Watch this video on the making of the triple axel scene in I, Tonya.

]]>4538Your work between coaching sessionshttps://vogelwakefield.com/2018/03/your-work-between-coaching-sessions/
Fri, 09 Mar 2018 11:52:41 +0000https://vogelwakefield.com/?p=4207Continue reading Your work between coaching sessions]]>How to work with a coach, part 8

The work you do between coaching sessions is as important as the work you do when you’re with your coach.

Coaching can be conceived as a staging post for the stuff, in the world beyond the sessions, that the client wants to work on. It’s a safe place to try out different ways of being. Coach and client reflect together on what the client brings and might formulate ideas for action. There may be an opportunity to rehearse in the session. But it’s not like learning a musical instrument, where the pupil practises in private before performing publicly on the stage. For the most part, the client practises on stage as they put the ideas into practice directly in their everyday life.

As in the deployment of software, the project is still in development as it is deployed; the encounter generates data which helps the client finesse their practice. This finessing happens both in real time between sessions and at the client’s next session with the coach, when there is an opportunity to debrief the experience and reflect on how the elegant plan conceived last time survived engagement with the client’s environment.

This pattern of learning, experimentation, application and reflection was recognised by the educational theorist, David Kolb, as the typical cycle by which adults learn. Our models of learning are often inspired by our experience of school, where children are treated (rightly or wrongly) as vessels into which new content is poured. But adults come to learning with considerable experience of life. New experience has to integrate with the worldview that they have already formed through their prior experience. Coaching is an ideal platform to support this.

Typically, when a client comes into coaching, they expose their worldview and mental models to reflection with their coach. In doing so, the coach brings challenge and introduces new content which prompts learning, hypothesising and experimentation in the client. The client takes the experimentation back to their routine life, testing their hypothesis in the real world, and generating feedback through noticing how people respond to whatever they might be doing differently. Drawing on this data, the client makes adjustments and the experimentation turns into more routine application. Back in coaching, on reflecting on this experience, the client assesses how the learning stood up in practice, integrates new learning into their worldview, and so the cycle revolves.

But it’s not just that you, the client, have pre-formed mental models. So do the people around you. When you go out into the world from coaching and try out new approaches, you will be encountering people who have prior mental models about who you are, how you behave and what part you’re supposed to play in their system. The plans you draw up in coaching can’t possibly take account of all the permutations of response that you might encounter when you put your plans into effect.

Think of it, in theatrical terms, as the difference between improv and a script. In a script, everyone has a predetermined role they are expected to play. The lines are known in advance. If you deviate from the script, everyone around you will try to get back on-script as quickly as possible.

In improv, the participants are on a journey with an unknown destination. There is no script. The principle is that when you offer a gambit, the other person runs with it. The players take their cues from each other, building as they proceed.

When you formulate strategies in coaching, you might implicitly imagine yourself to be writing a new script to rehearse on the stage outside the coaching session. But, in fact, you are probably devising an improv scenario. Getting this clear can be helpful: your purpose is to innovate, experiment and adaptive. Your psyche is material to what happens: it can be enjoyable and energising to play improv; but it’s also exposing. How can you get yourself in the right frame of mind?

But the next question is: will the people around you, the system in which you operate, be playing improv or will they be performing a script? Are they likely to welcome you trying out new stuff and support you in that? Or will they push back, trying to return you to the box where they are accustomed to finding you?

Most likely, the latter. So you will need to be prepared to offer your gambit repeatedly, perhaps adapting it, so that iteratively you hone your intervention and the people around you adjust their expectations of you and how they respond.

But, even there, the complexity does not end. For all these players in your drama are functioning within wider systems which themselves are in flux. Right now, with familiar geopolitical assumptions breaking down and Britain, in particular, at sea regarding its place in the world, all of us are working in contexts which are conditioned by wider uncertainty that is bordering on chaos. So, while you are attempting to evolve your new strategies, many of the others you encounter might well be trying the same.

It all adds up to significantly variable geometry of the elements around you. Making progress with your aspirations is more a matter of trial and error than executing a well thought-through plan.

You can see why it might help to have a quiet space to which to return to reflect on your impact with a disinterested other. But you don’t need to wait till your next coaching session to make sense of it all. It’s a good idea, if you can find the time and space, to institute a reflective practice as you go about trying to realise in your daily life what you bring to coaching. Simply keeping a journal works well. But if you’re not inclined to writing, then mind mapping or drawing might work. The main thing is to get beyond simply thinking through what you did and what happened as you tried out new possibilities. Recall also what you were thinking and feeling at the time and push your reflection to the level of working out what you’ve learned from the experience. What might you try differently next time?

If you’re not making the progress that you had hoped for, consider what is holding you to your old routine. The psychologist Robert Kegan speaks of our “immunity to change” whereby, although we may be convinced intellectually of the need to move into a different place, we experience powerful emotional ties to the status quo that we might not have taken into account. What are the pay-offs that you enjoy by sticking with the habits that you’ve determined you need to adjust?

By reflecting in this way, you are anticipating some of the ground you might cover with your coach when you next meet. You are clearing the way for a session which might go deeper, be more searching, than might otherwise have been the case. But you are also cultivating your capacity to self-coach. When the coaching contract comes to an end, you will have established the momentum to keep learning and keep developing. This is how you build a foundation for responding with equanimity and elegance as the world around you continues to throw up new challenges on you path.

]]>4207Working with your coachhttps://vogelwakefield.com/2018/03/working-with-your-coach/
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 20:18:32 +0000https://vogelwakefield.wordpress.com/?p=4127Continue reading Working with your coach]]>How to work with a coach, part 7

How should the working relationship with your coach develop? It’s worth thinking about this if you want to get the most out of your coaching. Clients sometimes take a while to realise that it’s not the best strategy to sit back and let coaching happen to them. Coaching is a two-way street and it pays to lean into it.

There is the one-person model where the conceit is that the coach is an objective observer of the client. In this model, the coach’s disposition is as an expert bringing knowledge and interpretation. Coaching is done on the client and there’s barely a recognition of a relationship between coach and client.

Then there is the one-and-a-half person model, which acknowledges that the coach is in the room with the client and has some impact on how the client shows up. The focus of the coach is on the client: enquiring into their subjective experience; providing empathy such that the client feels met and held. Coaching is offered to the client. But the relationship is really only one way.

Finally, there is the two-person model, which recognises that both coach and client bring their subjective experiences to the conversation. It is the interplay between these that determines the shape of what takes place in the session. Coaching is co-created by both parties to the conversation.

In reality, these models are not easily separated. They probably all come into play at different points in a coaching relationship. But, in my view, regardless of which model a coach and client think they are operating in, it is inescapable that there are two independent human beings in the room, each with their own agency and experience of the conversation. The coach’s impact on the client and the client’s impact on the coach cannot be easily bracketed out. The process is inherently an exercise in collaborative meaning-making. As a client, you bring stuff that influences how the conversation will unfold – your back story, your mental models, your assumptions about what is going on in coaching – and so does your coach. What happens in coaching is not just some objective process which is done to you. The course it takes is influenced at every moment by how you and your coach engage with it.

In coaching, we often speak of the coach maintaining a non-directive stance. But this doesn’t mean that the coach’s subjectivity is not in the room. A coach may offer a perspective or stand back and simply ask questions to elicit the client’s insights. But the questions are always coming from a place informed by the coach’s experience.

“Effective coaches often do tell. They educate their clients. They share their mental models, and tell them things when the answer eludes the client. They also spend a lot of time asking. But the questions they ask are not atheoretical … they are informed by their hypotheses about what is going on for the client. These hypotheses are built on the foundation of the coach’s understandings about what it means to be human, or in relationship, or in business, or healthy, or whatever else the coaching is about. Their domain-specific knowledge is constantly in play, but never overpowering the client. The coach’s telling is timely, the questions genuinely curious.”

By the same token, everything you are – the person who comes to coaching – is material to how the coaching unfolds. Not just what you bring to discuss but how you bring it and how you respond to what the coach contributes all have a significant impact on how the process will unfold and what value you can derive from it. The key point to remember as a client is that you are a collaborator in the process. What the coach contributes to your conversation is in the service of your meaning-making. It is offered for you to consider, to evaluate against your own worldview, working it up a bit in dialogue with your coach: perhaps synthesising it with your prior experience, perhaps modifying it, perhaps rejecting it.

The best outcomes in coaching come when the client engages with the conversation in an interactive way. Learning in coaching is not like learning in training or teaching. You don’t bring a blank slate which you fill up with new content. You bring all your prior experience and hone it in conversation.

And not just conversation. There may be role play, experiential exercises, drawing, imaginative work. How easily you throw yourself into this will influence what you get out of it.

There will be discomfort, for sure. Your highly-defended ways of making sense of things might be questioned. But a skilful coach will create an emotionally supportive environment in which you should feel safe to accept the challenge and kick it around. Discomfort, carefully orchestrated, is part of the deal. As the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan says, in his book In Over Our Heads:

“People grow best where they continuously experience an ingenious blend of support and challenge; the rest is commentary.”

It can pay to come to your sessions with a bit of an agenda. But also to be open to what shows up when you get stuck in. Clients sometimes want to leave the session with a bit of a strategy for dealing with what they’ve brought. This might happen. But it’s not the only outcome that can arise.

Sometimes coach and client can collude in designing a cunning plan which looks sensible and elegant in the circumstances of a rational conversation in a calm environment. But beware of the promise of such schemes. In reality, any change you want to make will be a function of many factors of which your contribution will be just a part. Any action you take might as easily be met by reaction to counter it as support to further your intent. As much as it feels satisfying to make plans, your time in coaching could sometimes be spent just as productively by simply thinking through what are the influences on the systems in which you operate. Any plans you make will inevitably take unforeseen turns in their encounter with your complex reality. It’s a good idea to anticipate the possible pitfalls before strategising.

Your coach might be seen as a guide who helps you navigate the path between intent and frustrated outcomes as you iteratively change course to keep moving forward. Designing new approaches in one session, testing them in the real world between sessions and reflecting on the outcomes in your next session is the very cycle of learning that coaching offers. Understanding your part in this will optimise the value you realise in coaching. It will help you master the art of balancing serious pursuit of your aspirations with not being too hard on yourself. And that will take you far in the long run.

]]>4127Spielberg’s The Post offers a masterclass in public leadershiphttps://vogelwakefield.com/2018/02/spielbergs-the-post-offers-a-masterclass-in-public-leadership/
Fri, 16 Feb 2018 13:52:08 +0000http://vogelwakefield.com/?p=3617Continue reading Spielberg’s The Post offers a masterclass in public leadership]]>Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee celebrate the court’s decision in 1971 to allow publication of the Pentagon Papers.

Steven Spielberg’s film The Post combines three themes close to my heart: leadership, journalism and power – with an interesting gender dimension overlaying all three.

The film portrays the days in 1971 when the Washington Post faced a dilemma whether to publish leaked material, the Pentagon Papers, showing how successive American presidents had deceived the public about the country’s purpose and prospects in Vietnam. The scoop already belonged to the New York Times. But an opportunity to catch up arose for the Post when Nixon’s government obtained an injunction against the Times, and the Post obtained the material independently.

There have been criticisms that it is perverse of the film-makers to focus on the role of the Post in the the Pentagon Papers affair, when the Times was the bigger player and took the earlier risk. However, that is to misconstrue the drama in which the Pentagon Papers affair is merely the MacGuffin on which hangs a tale of press freedom and gender politics. It is precisely because the Post was the lesser player that it merits attention. It’s the story of how a faltering business, guided by a woman in a male-dominated world, steps into the big league and transforms itself into a pillar of democracy. The whole episode serves as a dress rehearsal for Watergate, when the Post made the running in holding Nixon to account and ultimately brought down his presidency.

At the time of the events, the Washington Post was not much more than a local newspaper, albeit a special one whose beat was the seat of federal government. Like the New York Times, which far outranked it in national profile, the Post was a family-owned company. Its proprietor, Katharine Graham, had not yet become a legend of newspaper publishing. At the time of the events, she had been in the chair for about eight years – taking over after her husband had committed suicide, and having previously been overlooked for the role by her father who had given control of the company to his son-in-law.

However, she was not quite the inexperienced housewife-turned-business-owner portrayed in the film. She’d worked as a journalist in San Francisco and on the Post itself. Nonetheless, it’s easy to believe she may have felt at sea through the events portrayed. The Pentagon Papers affair coincided with her taking the company public. She was surrounded by commercial advisors who feared the banks would baulk at a floating in the midst of controversy. On the other hand, she shared the ambition of her editor, Ben Bradlee, to strengthen the editorial credibility of the paper. Both the newsroom and the boardroom are represented as male preserves in which Graham’s status is scarcely noticed: she’s treated as a puppet by the money men and as a potential roadblock by the editorial staff. In the background, Nixon is running a vendetta against the Post, so the stakes could not be much higher when Graham has to decide whether to publish in defiance of the injunction already obtained against the Times.

There’s a pivotal scene in which Graham considers whether the company’s interest lies in playing things safe for the sake of the floatation or betting the farm on being a standard bearer of the public interest. As Oxfam has discovered, this kind of decision is a false choice. Had she opted for safety first, the Post would have been finished as a serious editorial enterprise. There would have been newsroom resignations and the public would see that the Post had failed the test of press freedom. It may have maintained an existence as a viable provincial company, but it would struggle to enjoy trust and credibility on the national stage. Graham sees that the floatation document positions the paper on the ground of high-quality, independent journalism and realises that the business depends on integrity to this purpose. She bets on investors appreciating the long-term game. In doing so, she sweeps aside the patriarchal pretensions of her besuited advisors, asserting her right and duty as the company owner to take the decision.

Graham is remembered as the first female publisher of a major American newspaper and the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. These are impressive achievements. But even greater was her ability to use these positions to exercise stewardship. For she was the custodian not only of her company’s interest, but also of the public’s interest in facing down unaccountable executive power. The timeliness of the film in relation to the Trump presidency is evident; the Post and the Times are again to the fore in America’s ecology of checks and balances.

Bradlee argues in the film that for the Post to comply with the injunction against the Times would be an act of collusion. He says it’s incumbent on the press to exercise their freedom to publish, otherwise freedom of the press does not exist. The subsequent Supreme Court judgment upheld his position:

“In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

Besides the political resonance , there’s another timeliness in that the events in the story and their portrayal in the film bracket the neoliberal era. Viewed from 2018, the sense of caution imposed by the involvement of finance is wearingly familiar; the willingness of a business owner to fly in the face of received financial wisdom refreshingly shocking. There was plenty of cynical business in the 1970s. The rise of the market ideology was a corrective to some of it. But the trade-off it introduced between the public interest and the private interest went too far. Spielberg’s film signifies that we are ready to learn that lesson.

]]>3617Failure of leadership at Oxfamhttps://vogelwakefield.com/2018/02/failure-of-leadership-at-oxfam/
Tue, 13 Feb 2018 06:00:00 +0000http://vogelwakefield.com/?p=3604Continue reading Failure of leadership at Oxfam]]>Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January 2010.

Oxfam’s sex exploitation scandal (£) is a case study in how easily leaders can trash the reputation of their organisation when, through wilful blindness, they convince themselves that they are acting to protect it.

In a series of articles, The Times has revealed how Oxfam betrayed its purpose to help the vulnerable in Haiti, in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. It was a time when the country was devastated, and political authority had all but broken down. Senior aid workers in Haiti were able to seize the opportunity to organise the sexual exploitation of young women – including underage girls – whose desperation in the disaster presumably secured their compliance. There were said to be orgies and the exploitation of underage girls.

Scandals are rarely the work of a few and are indicative of a systemic malaise. We have learned not only that the sexual exploitation was able to be contrived under the auspices of Oxfam but that the organisation ignored numerous expressions of concern about the perpetrators, covered up the scandal when it came to light in 2011, and enabled the men to find employment elsewhere in the aid sector. Dame Barbara Stocking, the Oxfam chief executive at the time – now president of a college in Cambridge – allowed Oxfam’s country director in Haiti, Roland van Hauwermeiren, “a dignified exit”. Apparently, she was concerned that sacking him would have “potentially serious implications” for Oxfam’s reputation.

As The Times reports, he found employment in Bangladesh with a French charity that was given no warnings by Oxfam about his unethical conduct and even received positive references for him from Oxfam staff, including “an HR person”.

The Sunday Times reported that the Oxfam scandal is unlikely to be an isolated case. It revealed that more than 120 workers (£) for British aid charities were accused of sexual abuse in just the past year.

Given all we know about abuse scandals, it is not surprising that the aid sector should become an arena for exploitation. In fact, as The Times commentator, Libby Purves, tells us, it is a well-understood phenomenon (£):

“This is known, by those who study the workings of aid organisations, as an ‘imbalance of power’. As for the sex, a mild way to refer to it is as prostitution, with the comforting implication of a market. But really it is rape, violation, exploitation. United Nations peacekeepers in Africa have been found guilty though rarely punished. Sexual predation by both soldiers and aid workers is reported from the Philippines and Haiti. In Cambodia and Mozambique prostitution measurably rose after UN forces moved in, and hitherto rare sexually transmitted diseases became endemic, often among children. Nato peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo have been implicated too. It’s a known risk. Any well-run aid organisation knows that and, for the sake of the work and its majority of decent employees, it should be wary and pitilessly intolerant of abuse. This is not just ‘misconduct’ or ‘inappropriate’. It is crime, as serious as it would be on our own turf. When one of our most revered charities can’t grasp that, we are cumbered with shame.”

The leadership of Oxfam is finally beginning to show some, well, leadership. The deputy chief executive has resigned, taking full responsibility for failing to deal properly with the events of 2011. The charity’s chairwoman of trustees has spoken of her “anger and shame”, promising openness and transparency in order to learn the lessons of the affair. So far, this is no more than damage limitation. Turning things around will be a challenge; and the chief executive has not shown that he understands it.

The thing about reputation is that it’s not a quality that exists independently of an organisation’s behaviour. It is a direct function of the latter. The only way for an aid organisation to build a durable reputation is to inculcate high ethical standards among its staff, anticipating the possibilities for corruption and acting to prevent them. Instead, at Oxfam – staff told The Times – Roland Van Hauwermeiren and his cohorts “hid behind a weak code of conduct, which only stated that staff should not bring the organisation into disrepute.”

Having discovered in 2011 that it had a scandal on its hands, the temptation the leadership faced to cover up is all to obvious. The demand of stewardship, though, would dictate candour. Libby Purves again:

“The honest, painful way to protect your brand is to cauterise the filthy wound, hand the creeps over and reveal and reject and disgrace previously cherished colleagues.”

The attention leaders give to brand and reputation is looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope. It is to prioritise protecting the existence of an organisation above pursuing the purpose for which the organisation exists. Integrity of purpose is the best way to protect reputation. Oxfam’s purpose is to serve the most vulnerable in the most desperate of circumstances. To execute this purpose it needs to foster trust above all. Those who betray the purpose should be rooted out quickly and publicly, and lessons learned in full transparency.

How has protecting its reputation worked out for Oxfam? It is at risk of losing public funding – UK and European – and a large volume of individual donors will also surely drift away. At worst, its continued existence must be in doubt. At best, it has a mountain to climb, far steeper than that it faced in 2011 when it had the choice to come clean.